


I'm Inside My Head (How do I Get Out of It)

by orphan_account



Series: The Cipher Twins [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Dark Character, Demonic Possession, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Gen, Human Bill Cipher, Mind Manipulation, Mind Meld, Non-Graphic Violence, One Shot, and also mabel and dipper being bill, bill being bill, dream demon pines twins, no happy ending, set right after the first fic, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:26:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2376428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Bill Cipher fails to take important variables into account, and everyone pays the price.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Inside My Head (How do I Get Out of It)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Fallulah's song 'Out of It'.  
> This fic will not make a lot of sense if you haven't read the first one. Sorry.

Dipper gasped awake, his eyes flying open, as he looked around the bedroom. He must've had a nightmare, he realized as he sat up in bed, but he couldn't quite remember it.

 

_Spider threads keeping him trapped in the back of his own mind; screaming well past when his throat should've gone hoarse to be let go, because no matter how hard he tried to manipulate the mindscape it just wouldn't work._

 

Dipper shivered, and blamed it on the chill of the morning air in the room. He grasped at the tiny almost-memories that wriggled in the back of his mind, but they quickly slipped out of reach, and he forgot the nightmare again.

Looking over at Mabel's bed, he found her still sleeping, occasionally giving a soft snore. Waddles was curled up by her side, snuffling in his sleep, and Dipper breathed a quiet laugh at the picture the two of them made. He got out of bed, got dressed, grabbed the journal from its hiding place, and went down the stairs as quietly as possible to the living room.

He'd been hoping to find another clue about the author by going over the journal again, but so far he hadn't found much that he hadn't already noticed before; only a small note about satyrs, which didn't help even remotely, and a tiny sentence crossed out in the corner of one page, reading _~~don't get lost~~_.

Dipper frowned, looking at the rest of the page. It was about dryads, which failed to provide context for the scribbled out note, and honestly just raised more questions.

 

_"Say, Pine Tree, what do you think of labyrinths?" Bill asked, grinning up at Dipper. The boy struggled in the web that held him, but once again found himself unable to break free. He wasn't sure whether he'd been inside his head for hours or weeks, and he was equally unsure of whether he wanted to know either way. How much damage could Bill do in an hour? Dipper shuddered to think._

Dipper blinked, unable to remember what he'd just been thinking about. Oh well. He went back to scouring the journal's pages, but by the time half an hour had passed he was growing hungry and had no more information to show for his work, so he got up and headed to the kitchen.

He poured himself a bowl of cereal, glancing more than once at the clock as he ate. It was strange that Grunkle Stan wasn't awake yet; the man didn't really sleep in this late, Dipper had noticed. Glancing outside, Dipper realized the car was gone, and he felt a small tinge of realization. Grunkle Stan must have gone somewhere early, and not wanted to wake him and Mabel, Dipper reasoned.

 

_"What do you mean by 'labyrinths'?" Dipper asked the demon, narrowing his eyes._

_"I mean endless mazes of confusion and dead ends that you can never get out of." Bill defined much too cheerily._

_"I don't like them." Dipper replied. Bill grinned, Mabel's braces catching the sourceless light of the dreamscape._

_"Well I do." Bill shrugged her sweater-clad shoulders. "I'm thinking of making some for you and Shooting Star, to keep you from fighting so hard and giving me headaches all the time."_

 

The quiet was strange. It was never really this quiet in the Mystery Shack; someone was always talking, or the television was on, or a monster got in, or some tourist was wondering extremely loudly if the gift shop had a t-shirt in their size. But now it was just...silent. It felt kind of ominous.

Dipper started on his way back upstairs once he'd finished breakfast, and ignored the way the hairs on the back of his neck stood up when even the creaky stairs failed to creak as loud as normal. He eventually made it to the attic, but stopped short when he saw Mabel’s bed was empty.

“Mabel?” He asked, but there was no reply. “Mabel, this isn’t funny!”

 

_“You can’t trap us in mazes, we’ll just find a way out.” Dipper protested, not adding on the ‘eventually’ that rose to his lips. Bill laughed._

_“Not if you don’t know you’re in a maze to begin with!” The demon countered. “You’ll wake up and think everything’s fine. You won’t even remember this!”_

He searched the whole house, but found no sign of anyone. No Mabel, no Waddles, no goat, not even the squirrels that usually hung out around the shack. He was alone.

“She was here, though.” Dipper muttered to himself. “Mabel couldn’t have just disappeared, could she?”

Going back to the journal, he flipped through it with increasing worry, searching for anything relevant. He found a page on invisibility curses, but it didn’t affect sound, which meant that even if Mabel and Waddles had somehow been turned invisible, he’d still be able to hear them. So that didn’t help.

Flipping to the next page, he saw a series of numbers he’d never noticed before, scribbled out so that they were barely legible anymore. _~~4.26.16.22 6.11!~~_

Dipper grabbed a pen and a couple of sticky notes, writing down the alphabet and each letter’s corresponding number to use as the key to the code. When that didn’t work, he shifted the alphabet three letters back as he’d seen a few other times in the journal, and when that failed he flipped the alphabet so that ‘a’ became number twenty-six instead of number one.

_W-a-k-e u-p!_

The message couldn’t be directed at him, he reasoned. He was already awake…wasn’t he? Frowning, Dipper felt uneasiness roll into his thoughts like a fog, and he shook his head to clear it.

 

_“What?!” Dipper exclaimed, starting to panic._

_“You heard me, Pine Tree.” Bill said gleefully. “You won’t be able to get out of your mind; you won’t even know you’re inside it. Careful not to get too lost, Pine Tree!”_

_With that, Bill laughed and waggled her fingers in a mocking wave goodbye, and Dipper’s sight started to go white, fading into nothing as he struggled against the webs still holding him up._

Tucking the journal away in his vest, Dipper headed out into the woods. It wasn’t much, but it might help him find Mabel, and if he cut through to town, he might be able to find Grunkle Stan. It was the best plan he could come up with.

He hiked through the woods, unsettled by the unnatural quiet. Searching for a sign of anything else alive, a bird or even an annoying gnome, Dipper felt like he couldn’t even call out for Mabel for fear of breaking the silence. He heard a branch snap somewhere behind him and whirled around, only catching the tiniest glimpse of a shadow out of the corner of his eye.

His first thought was the hide-behind, but he’d always been unable to prove that it existed. Plus it was supposed to make a rattling noise, not step on sticks. Dipper took a deep breath to steady himself, and started walking back in the direction he’d heard the noise from, dismissing the feeling of eyes on him.

 

What seemed like hours later, he still hadn’t reached town, or any road, or even the Mystery Shack again. It was just the woods, going out forever in every direction, and the occasional shadow that made him turn around hoping to see someone there. Paranoid and about ready to start hyperventilating, Dipper kept walking in the hopes of finding _anything_ that wasn’t the same endless trees. It was starting to get dark, but that couldn’t be right because he’d just woken up a few hours ago, hadn’t he?

“Dipper?” Someone called, and it sounded like Mabel’s voice. Dipper looked up in the direction the voice came from.

“Mabel?” He asked, and waited for a response.

“Dipper!” The voice called out again. Dipper broke into a dead sprint.

He could feel tears rising into his eyes when he caught sight of Mabel in the distance, and when she caught sight of him she started running too, until they were both brought up short by what could only be described as a force-field. They both ran basically face first into the invisible barrier, and bounced back with matching yelps of surprise.

“Mabel! You’re okay!” Dipper grinned in relief, despite the fact that they were still separated.

“I woke up and you were there, but then Grunkle Stan was gone so I came back and you _weren’t_ there, and I’ve been walking for _hours_ Dipper, what is going on?” Mabel put her hands up against the barrier.

“Same; the same thing happened to me.” Dipper shook his head. “And the journal had these weird messages in it,”

“I didn’t have the journal, but the trees sometimes had words carved in them.” Mabel interrupted.

“And I kept hearing something behind me.” Dipper finished.

“Exactly!” Mabel exclaimed. “What’s going _on_?”

“I have no idea.” Dipper replied. “But the journal told me to wake up, and not to get lost. I think…I think this might be a dream.”

The forest around them shattered like a mirror, the remnants of it fading into the grey of the mindscape, and memories came rushing back to him. He remembered Bill, possessing both of them somehow, constructing the labyrinth, trapping him. But then, Dipper thought, was Mabel real? She should have been in her own mind, after all, not his.

“Are you…” Mabel trailed off, her eyes wide, and Dipper realized she’d just remembered the same things as he had.

“Yeah.” Dipper nodded, knowing what she was going to ask.

“Okay.” Mabel didn’t ask him to prove it. “Now what?”

“Now,” Bill’s voice echoed out of nowhere. “I send you back to the beginning of the labyrinth, like I’ve done every time!”

The twins shared a panicked glance. _Every time._ That meant they’d done this before. They were trapped in a loop, if Bill was to be believed, unable to do anything but wake up without their memories, over and over.

“You did make it further than you usually do, though.” Bill said, sounding almost impressed. “Usually you guys don’t find each other. Your connection must be getting stronger, I guess. I’ll have to accommodate for that next time around.”

“We have to break the loop!” Mabel shouted.

“How?” Dipper asked incredulously, placing a hand against the force-field between them. _Wait a minute._

He shared a glance with Mabel, knowing she was thinking the same thing. Looking around, the two of them picked up rocks and started hitting the barrier, grinning victoriously when hairline cracks started to appear in it with each blow.

“What are you doing?” Bill demanded. “Stop that!”

Vines wrapped around their arms and legs, dragging the twins away from the force-field. Thorns dug into their flesh, and Dipper yelped in pain, hearing his sister do the same, but they grit their teeth against the pain and kept struggling, trying to break the barrier and end the loop. The two of them fought, and were able to break free a few times for long enough to get more hits in before the vines grabbed them again. Little by little, the cracks in the barrier grew and widened.

“Don’t!” Bill sounded legitimately scared now, which almost made them pause. “You’ll destroy the walls keeping you separate; your minds will connect indefinitely!”

The demon appeared out of thin air, single eye wide with alarm, and flew toward them just as the barrier started to break apart. The vines receded, looking almost like they were running away. Dipper and Mabel shared a look, resolving themselves to face whatever fate this would bring them, and they both hit the force-field as hard as they could.

The two of them weren’t thrown backwards, as Dipper had almost expected. Instead the barrier seemed to shatter _around_ them, and he dropped the rock in his hand and reached out for Mabel, and she reached out for him, and Bill didn’t have time to backtrack and ended up crashing into them at the same time that the twins’ fingers intertwined.

They felt as if an unbearable weight was crushing down on them, forcing them together, and they screamed, agonized and primal. Their memories were spun together, thousands of years of knowledge and power crushing down and mixing into the combined twenty-four already there. Their personalities, their souls, merged, intertwining until there was nothing left of the individuals. They were Bill and they were Mabel and they were Dipper, experiences and habits and viewpoints all pressed together into one mind inseparable from itself.

 

They snapped awake, taking in the sight of the worried faces above them. They were on the floor, they realized, and they stood, looking down at themselves and around at the gift shop of the Mystery Shack.

“Matching suits.” He-that-used-to-be-Dipper scoffed at their own predictability.

“Uh, Dipper? Mabel?” Wendy asked, her eyes full of concern.

“Yes.” They confirmed, and her brow furrowed in confusion.

“You kids okay?” Stan inquired. He seemed different than in their older memories of him; the memories It-that-used-to-be-Bill provided them with were contradictory to the image of the man in front of them. They tipped their heads sideways, wondering about the inconsistencies in their recollections, but soon filed the line of thought away to be pondered over later.

“We’re fine.” They replied.

“What day is it?” She-that-used-to-be-Mabel continued. There was no reason to speak as one all the time when they had two mouths between them; that’d just cause unwanted attention.

“Uhhh,” Soos turned to the calendar on the wall. “Tuesday. The twenty-fourth.”

“Three days.” They almost laughed. It had seemed like so much longer while the twins had been trapped, and so much shorter while Bill had been walking around in their bodies.

“They’re still acting weird. I vote we wait and see if they pass out again and go back to normal.” Stan tried to joke, but his voice was unsure, and they could see the nervousness underneath the smile he was forcing.

“We’re fine.” They insisted, but they weren’t sure if it was the truth. They were a demon, they were humans, they were one mind and three people and two bodies and it didn’t make any sense and they weren’t sure anymore whether they should be following through with It-that-used-to-be-Bill’s old plans or being kids and solving Gravity Falls’ mysteries—they already knew most of the answers now anyway. They found themselves directionless and without a clue how to react.

“We’ll just be upstairs.” He-that-used-to-be-Dipper said, and they ran up to the attic before anyone could stop them.

 _What now?_ They thought, sitting cross legged in their beds and facing each other from across the room. _How can we act normal until we fix this?_

 _Can we even fix this?_ They searched through their memories, of the journal and of centuries of knowledge, and they found no solution that wouldn’t leave them dead or irreparably insane from the disconnection. They were one mind now, despite having been different personalities before. They wondered if that meant they still had the powers Bill had had before, and they tested it, easily summoning the blue fire used to bind contracts and sending themselves into the dreamscape.

“Human bodies…” He-that-used-to-be-Dipper started, twirling a flame around his fingers like one might do with a coin.

“…With dream demon powers.” She-that-used-to-be-Mabel finished, summoning them new outfits out of nowhere to replace the loved but too-formal suits. The clothes were fairly reminiscent of the twins’ old outfits; she had simple black pants and a dark sweater, with a bright yellow triangle in the middle of it. He had shorts and a yellow t-shirt, with a black vest and cap with the same bright triangle on the front. The perfect mix of similarities and individualities, they decided with nods of satisfaction, plus the new clothes’ dark coloring made them seem almost more formal, which fit their new self quite nicely.

 _Do we even want to fix this?_ Became the new question, which after a moment was answered, quietly yet wholeheartedly _._ They had the combined benefits of being human and demon, they had power over the mindscape but existed in the physical world, they were around a thousand years ago and probably-eternal youth so that they could now easily live another thousand. But did they want that if it meant staying one instead of three? _Do we want to change this?_

The answer, they eventually found, was _no._


End file.
